The GOP Is Not Giving Up 50 Years of Bigotry for This Guy

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Herman Cain's "rise" consists of a win in a pay-for-play straw poll in Florida, and his ability to muster, at last count, 18 percent support in a poll of New Hampshire Republicans. And that's pretty much the whole thing, unless you count getting yelled about by Al Sharpton on TV, which, I will admit, some people do. The notion of him as a transformational figure in black politics, based on his embrace of the shopworn notion of "the liberal plantation," and the idea that a majority of the grumpy white folks in the old Confederacy are so far along on race that they'll make him the nominee of the Republican party, makes me wonder, seriously, if we all just ought to take the next six weeks off and forget about politics for a while. With all due respect to John McWhorter, if he thinks Cain's being black "doesn't bother" the white reactionary voters at the heart of the GOP, well, he likely should just give it time. And please do better than hanging your argument on this:

"One is that the connection between conservatism and racism has always been exaggerated — or entirely confected, in the view of some Republicans — by liberals. The case for the defense notes, among other things, that it was Lincoln, a Republican president, who freed the slaves; that southern 'Dixiecrats' were often outright racists; and that the first black senator of the modern era and the first two black secretaries of state were all Republicans (Edward Brooke, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, respectively)."

Jesus God, man, read some history, will you? Or, otherwise, some conservative might come up to you one day and you'll trade him your car for a bag of magic beans. If you don't want to read, at least Google "Harry Dent" or "Southern strategy." Republicans made a conscious choice to abandon the traditions that began with Lincoln and produced Edward Brooke in order to profit politically from the backlash against the accomplishments of the civil-rights movement and the remnants of white-supremacy, especially in the South. This wasn't an accident. It was a shrewd — if amoral — calculation. That is how black voters came to be attached to the Democratic party; hell, it's why Martin Luther King, Sr. stopped being a Republican. If you think that party is willing to surrender 50 years of profitable bigotry for the political phenomenon that is Herman Cain, well, you should take it up with the future of the GOP, Congressman J.C. Watts, or former chairman Michael Steele, who also represented the new multiracial party for a while. I also wish you luck with your beanstalk.